Zika forest is a natural and tropical type of forest, 23km from Kampala (capital city of Uganda) &17km from Entebbe international airport.
ZIKA means “overgrown” as translated from Luganda local language.
It has a rich biodiversity in plants and moths and is home to over 40mosquito types.
It is also a research center for various diseases especially those spread by mosquitoes. And the investigation of mosquitoes at zika forest started in 1946 and later in 1947 the ZIKA VIRUS was also isolated in a Rhesus monkey by the researchers.
But wasn’t their target, their target was yellow fever which was a serious problem in most African countries by that time.
In 1960 the researchers were forced to move a steel tower( I will post it in my next post) from mpanga forest in Mpigi district to study the vertical distribution of mosquitoes.
In 1967, by the help of that tower, that is when the researchers realized that the ZIKA VIRUS was from a collected “Aedes Africanus” mosquito. That is a day active mosquito and it’s incubation period is about 3-10days.
From that time, the routine collection of mosquitoes at zika forest stopped for like 4decades until 2010 when the virus spread fear across the world that the work of collecting mosquitoes at zika forest resumed again. That’s all about zika forest, unless you have any question…
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This is the steel tower which I was talking about in my first post which was move from mpanga forest in Mpigi district to zika forest in Entebbe to study the vertical distribution of the in 1960.
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